1. Technical Field
The present disclosure generally relates to networked systems, and in particular document management systems in networked environments that manage electronic or digital documents or files owned by various entities.
2. Description of the Related Art
Many commercial, government and/or non-profit entities have multiple offices, sites or facilities which may be geographically dispersed around a city, state, province, country or even around the World. These offices, sites or facilities are typically communicatively coupled by one or more communications networks. Such allows for enterprise wide communications between the various offices, sites or facilities, including the sharing or exchange of electronic or digital documents or files.
Many such enterprise wide networks employ a document management system. The document management system often provides centralized storage or replication of electronic or digital documents or files for multiple offices, sites or facilities. Typically, such document management systems will employ a number of satellite servers or nodes to provide local users at remote offices, sites or facilities with access to the centrally stored electronic or digital documents or files.
Many document management systems employ an ownership scheme to limit or control which entities are able to perform certain actions (e.g., read, modify or edit, delete) on the electronic or digital documents or to authorize other entities to perform such actions. Thus, for example, an owner of a given electronic or digital document may be allowed to read, modify or delete that electronic or digital document. Further, the owner of a given electronic or digital document may have the ability to authorize other entities to read, modify or delete that electronic or digital document. Ownership may be logically associated with a satellite office, site or facility level, where a given satellite office, site or facility is the owner of one or more electronic or digital documents and thus has the rights, permission, privileges and/or authority of an owner with respect to those electronic or digital documents. Alternatively, or additionally, ownership may be logically associated with an individual user, wherein a given individual user is assigned as the owner of one or more electronic or digital documents or files and has the rights, permission, privileges and/or authority of an owner with respect to those electronic or digital documents. Ownership is typically restricted to a single satellite office, site or facility, or in some document management systems to a single individual user.
Such networked document management systems must be able to provide access to a most recent version of an electronic or digital document. However, such may be difficult, particularly in a multi-user environment in which ownership or authority to perform an action (e.g., read, modify or edit, delete) on a particular electronic or digital document may be shared or may change over time. Such difficulty may be exacerbated where a local or satellite office, site or facility may temporarily be unable to communicate with the central server or node, a situation commonly referred to as being “off-line.”
As an example of a typical scenario, a first electronic or digital document may be create by a first user associated with a first remote satellite office. The ownership with respect to the first electronic or digital document will typically default to the entity associated with the creation of the document, in this case the first remote satellite office or first user. A document management system may store or replicate the first electronic or digital document to a central storage device. If a second user associated with a second satellite office wishes to simply read the first electronic or digital document, then the second satellite office or second user only needs permission to read such, where the read permission is granted by the owner of the first electronic or digital document. Read access to the centrally stored or replicated copy of the first electronic or digital document is provided to the second user. However, if the second user associated with the second satellite office wishes to modify the first electronic or digital document, the document management system may require changing the ownership of the first electronic or digital document to the second satellite office or second user. If ownership is changed, the second user receives all the rights, permission, privileges or authority of the owner with respect to the centrally stored or replicated copy of the first electronic or digital document. Centralized storage or replication of all electronic or digital documents tends to be cornerstone of conventional document management systems.